Abram Bergson, EconomistApril 21, 1914 – April 23, 2003

Abstract

Over the last two‐thirds of the twentieth century, Abram Bergson was a leading American and world mathematical economist. He was a creative theorist, both literary and statistical. Also Bergson was a careful empiricist who, from a bully pulpit at Harvard, earned a reputation as the dean of Soviet studies and teacher of that subject’s major scholars over two generations. At a young age in 1933 Abram came to the Harvard Graduate School in economics, after undergraduate training at Johns Hopkins. Adolph Hitler was responsible for new foreign blood arriving in Cambridge to trigger an overdue pre‐war Harvard renaissance in economics. When Bergson died at age 89, he was the last survivor of Harvard’s age of Frank Taussig, as well as being a young star in the new age of Joseph Schumpeter, youthful Wassily Leontief, eclectic Gottfried Haberler and, after 1937, Alvin Hansen, the ‘American Keynesian’. As Leontief’s second protegé, I am proud to have been preceded by Abram Bergson, his first protegé. I would be honoured to be known as Bergson’s first protegé, for much of my own work in welfare economics owes virtually everything to his classic 1938 Quarterly Journal of Economics article that for the first time clarified this subject as treated by Lionel Robbins, Abba Lerner, John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Tibor Scitovsky ‐ and, of course, earlier by Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, F.Y. Edgeworth, and A.C. Pigou.